One Team: Clinical Excellence

Clinical care professionals at Carolinas HealthCare System comprise one team, dedicated to pursuing clinical excellence on a national level. They fulfill this goal by consistently improving the quality of care for each patient, while seeking new approaches to treatment and disease management.

Clinical accomplishments made national news throughout 2012, based on significant strides in a broad variety of specialties. Levine Children's Hospital (LCH), for example, was the focal point for one of the most talked about medical stories of the year involving a sports figure, Carolina Panther Greg Olsen.

Olsen's wife, Kara, gave birth to twins in October; and, although daughter Talbot was born in good health, son T.J. was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The condition required surgery immediately following birth. Benjamin Peeler, MD, guided the surgical staff through a high risk operation known as the "Norwood Procedure." Their success was reported by media outlets across the country, highlighting an ongoing series of achievements by the pediatric congenital heart program at Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute (SHVI).

Another program that gained national visibility in 2012 was the Charlotte Fetal Care Center (CFCC), which is the only center of its type in the Southeast. The director of the center, Courtney Stephenson, MD, is one of just 40 fetal surgeons in the world and is thought to be the sole female surgeon in this highly specialized field.

She and David Iannitti, MD, performed a first-of-its-kind surgery, an ultrasound-guided procedure that makes it possible for a viable fetus to survive an often-fatal condition known as "twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome." CFCC is one of the few facilities in the world pioneering this type of surgery, and to date it has some of the best recorded outcomes.